Move to Amazon Web Services from 1&1 Servers

Over the past couple of weeks I have been moving my website from the 1&1 servers I had initially purchased for a couple of years to Amazon Web Services. I initially had purchased a 1&1 web hosting plan with my domain hosting because it was cheap and I had used it for a job previously. When I switched over to Jekyll I wanted to set up some sort of automatic deployment. With 1&1 servers I couldn't actually SSH into my server and I don't know if they'd even let me install anything on the server.

So I called 1&1 and got refunded for the remaining time of my contract. I had used Amazon Web Services for some smaller projects in the testing stages but I wanted to learn more about what they had to offer. I naively chose the Amazon EC2 first because that is what I had used in the past to serve files from a Java RESTful web service.

I created a micro instance, but quickly figured out that this probably wasn't what I wanted. I realized that EC2 was an actual server, made to query a database and serve dynamic content. While what I had was just a bunch of static files that needed to be served.

Doing some research I found out that Amazon had exactly what I needed called Amazon S3.

"You can host your entire static website on Amazon S3 for an inexpensive, highly available hosting solution that scales automatically to meet traffic demands."

I created my first bucket and the rest is history! I will be writing some more posts about my experiences about building, serving, deploying and making my website faster.